Retirement Security

The financial services industry is second to none in dreaming up ways to rip off Americans. Show me a a financial product—credit cards, mortgages, checking accounts, 401(k)s, annuities—and I'll show you a stack of consumer complaints documenting how banks and other firms have sought to...

A proposal to adjust how Social Security benefit increases are calculated did not make it into the final fiscal cliff deal. Nor did various ideas for making affluent Medicare recipients pay more in premiums or deductibles.
Don't be fooled: Proposals to trim entitlements for the elderly will...

The Fed's announcement that it would keep interest rates at nearly zero until unemployment falls below 6.5 percent was, by most measures, good news. Although cheap money has proven to be no great solution to a weak economy, it has had some positive effects. Just ask anyone who has managed to...

One of the many parts of the financial sector that the crisis exposed as desperately in need of reform was the 401(k) industry. In 2008 alone, the securities industry lost over $2 trillion in workers’ hard-earned 401(k) and IRA savings. This loss was problematic enough for the millions of American...

For the magazine’s 20th Anniversary, the September issue of SmartMoney has a long section recapping changes in American personal finance -- and on what they got right and wrong -- over the last two decades.
Their historical review starts with the blunt question:
Who’s responsible for your...

Recently, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial harshly criticizing a bill being considered by the California State Assembly to create universal, portable retirement accounts, administered by an independent board and invested in private financial markets. The op-ed calls the accounts...

Most of us with 401(k) plans watched in horror as our retirement savings plummeted in the stock market crash of 2008. That year, the average 401(k) balance dropped by a third, forcing older Americans to delay retirement or cut back on spending. Since then, as the market rebounded, some of our...

Martin Luther King, Jr. would have turned 83 on January 15th, putting him well into the realm of being an African-American senior citizen. We might wonder what King would have been like in his later years and how his retirement might have played out. If King were like the...